Ladd and Fiske: NC Legislators Quietly Alter Public School Funding

25Sep

Elected thieves in North Carolina—bought and paid for by corporations and billionaires—are quietly at work to destroy public education in that state—giving favored treatment to charters and adopting a voucher program that diverts funds from public schools and puts them in the hands of religious and other private schools immune from public accountability…

Professor Helen Ladd of Duke University, internationally renowned economist of education, and her husband Edward Fiske, former education editor of the New York Times, recently wrote about a sneaky move by the North Carolina legislature to undermine the funding of children in public schools. Not content to fund charters and vouchers, the legislature is directly attacking the basic funding formula for the state public system. The overwhelming majority of children in the state attend public schools. Why do their parents elect these people who short-change public education?

Ladd and Fiske write:

“In a last-minute change that was taken with no hearings and no prior publicity, the Republican-controlled General Assembly has undermined the fundamental building block of school finance in North Carolina.

“Ever since the state took over responsibility from the local districts for funding public schools during the Great Depression, state funding in North Carolina has been based on the…